Last weekend I watched a feature film, Son of Saul. It is a Hungarian film set in Auschwitz/Birkenau extermination camp and follows a day-and-a-half in the life of a Jewish-Hungarian prisoner assigned to the ‘Special Unit’.

This unit salvaged valuables from the clothing of the dead, dragged bodies from gas chambers, and scrubbed effluents away before the next group of prisoners arrived to be gassed. It was sickening in every sense because I know it happened.

On Monday I attended the annual commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day at Staffordshire University to hear Vice Chancellor Professor Liz Barnes and the university’s Chief Operating Officer, Ian Blachford, relate their recent visit to Auschwitz to an audience of community leaders and schoolchildren.

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Without going into detail, both speakers ended by saying that the emotion of what they had seen would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

That’s something I know to be true. When riding a military motorbike in 1956 I took a wrong turn on the road to Hamburg.

The road became a track and unexpectedly I found myself inside the perimeter of Belsen concentration camp gazing incredulously at the large mounds of earth that had been raised to cover tens of thousands of bodies.

It instantly brought back memories of the shocking newsreel footage shown to unbelieving cinemagoers in 1945. This was that same place; and the one feeling I took away from there was precipitous silence, a silence that can only be explained as the silence of collective guilt.

Professor Barnes wondered at the recent polls indicating that 1 in 20 British youngsters do not believe the Holocaust happened, or that the murdered six million Jews is an exaggeration.

She worried about the increase in anti-Semitism and the current turn towards nationalism. And she condemned the recent uttering of one of the discoverers of DNA, the Nobel Prize winner Dr James Watson, who continues to repeat unfounded and inflammatory pronouncements on genetics and racial purity.

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It is difficult to understand where such thinking comes from – certainly not from the prospectus of primary and secondary education where the sources and consequences of European history are taught.

Unlike other crimes of genocide, the Holocaust opens up so many unanswered questions. Why, for instance, did ordinary people instinctively commit such bestial hurt upon their neighbours; and why did a majority look away inertly?

Perhaps more intriguing, why did so many succumb to what appears to have been the predictable consequences of ‘round ups’, captured in the images of pitifully orderly lines in the stockyards of death?

Aside from the Holocaust so many inhuman crimes have been and are being committed against minority populations. Unlike the Holocaust though, where victims were used to assist in the commission, most atrocities are committed in acts of confrontation.

During the 1992-1995 Bosnian civil war, an estimated 100,000 people were killed – 80 per cent were Bosniaks.

The worst massacre took place in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 men and boys from the town of Srebrenica, the largest mass murder in Europe since the Holocaust.

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We do not doubt these numbers, for they are historical facts and as such provide convincing data.

The numbers shock, but they don’t touch us. We do not feel the individual’s pain because the numbers are too huge to relate to.

Looking out from our islands we absorb the newsreel’s interpretation. And then another report comes in, another ‘event’ in another country. In passing we make adjustments that serve our consciences; but others modify numbers to provide ammunition for their own ideologies.

For many the Holocaust is unforgettable, for others it is unimaginable.

And, illogically, it is the terrible nature and the time span of its execution that makes it unbelievable. That’s where the likelihood of it being repeated lurks, and that’s why we must never forget the numbers.